As email archiving projects mature, risk mitigation will emerge as the primary objective. As discussed in the storage alert Separating email archiving technologies, the infrastructure email archiving and the exploitation of that archive to identify and mitigate risk have completely different characteristics, and will refresh on completely different cycles.

Email archiving infrastructure technologies and solutions will be common across most industries, and will respond to traditional and broad economies of scale. They will compete to be the platform of choice for the suppliers of exploiting technologies, and should be careful not to compete with these suppliers. New entrants such as Google and Microsoft are likely to exploit their distributed file services to offer web-based solutions. Outsourcing in general is likely to be a significant component of the industry.

Software based vendors that create solutions that identify and mitigate risk will compete based on the ability to integrate different sources of data and on specific industry knowledge. They will require and expect unfettered access to data sources such as an email archive, and will not support suppliers that compete with or impede them. The rewards for success are likely to be high and short term.

Action Item: As the email archiving market realigns, vendors should choose where they compete carefully. Strategies that vertically integrate infrastructure with risk mitigation and deep application function are unlikely to retain long-term economies of scale. Strategies that lock in customers by restricting their ability to exploit the data in the archive are very unlikely to retain traction.